Immeasurable Metrics

Hello from Sydney! Welcome back to Footprint — and happy Friday.

🪥 The latest marathon essential? Annie Tran posted this viral Instagram reel of her “secret for not hitting the wall” in Tokyo earlier this month: a disposable toothbrush, which she used at Mile 20.

Best of luck to everyone running the NYC Half on Sunday.

Two creatives who like to run – musician Harry Styles (pictured) and writer Haruki Murakami – on the simplicity, solitude and structure offered by running • Read

Sam Ruthe, 16, became the youngest person to break the four-minute mile last year. “Running a fast time doesn’t mean a lot to me, as there are always a lot of people faster,” he tells Eva Corlett in the Guardian, “even if they are a bit older” • Read

High school coach Nathan Martin won last Sunday’s LA Marathon by 0.01 seconds after Kenya’s Michael Kimani inadvertently followed a race motorbike off course. A similar debacle plunged the US Half Marathon Championships into disarray, Jess Hopkins reports for The Athletic • Read

A record 240,000 applicants from more than 160 countries applied to run November’s New York City Marathon, according to its organizers New York Road Runners • Read

Supermarket super shoes? Lidl has unveiled the cut-price carbon-plated CarbonLite1.0, Matt Lawton reports in The Times • Read

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen hates running. But he likes rock climbing.

He figured the sport was dumb – muscle bros screaming like Arnold Schwarzenegger, hauling themselves up – until he gave it a try, and found a hobby that was “kind of like solving logic puzzles, with your body, in yoga,” he told the Plain English podcast last month.

At first, Nguyen fixated on climbing’s regimented scoring system. “And I kept advancing, and it kept being good, until I hit a wall,” he recalled. “That wall was partly because I’m busy, partly for my own athletic cap, and partly because I became a parent.

“And I just couldn’t advance. And when I kept to the scoring system of climbing, I became miserable, right?”

Nguyen kept at it for a while, miserably, until he decided to reformulate the way he thought about the sport. Inspired in part by older climbers who had explained how they weren’t focused on difficulty, but trying to climb gracefully, “I started, instead of trying to go harder, to go more graceful,” he told Plain English. “And that – it’s super interesting – because that gave me the joy back.”

Keeping score with the conventional metrics worked, until it didn’t. So he found a new way to enjoy the sport.

Listening to Nguyen (who has written a book about how scoring systems have overridden our lives) made me think about running.

Time keeps the score in running: every jog, every workout, every race, crystalized into a number.

But that number only captures the speed at which you traveled from the start to the finish. It says next to nothing about what happened along the way: how you felt, what you saw, who you shared it with.

“Keep track of time if you must,” Mario Fraioli wrote in his Morning Shakeout newsletter this week, “but remember to lose yourself in the experience, not the data.”

On a run back from work the other day, I reached Sydney Harbour just as the sun was starting to set. Weaving through throngs of tourists, stopping to take photos, and breathing in the golden hour I had inadvertently stumbled upon, I wasn’t thinking about mile splits.

Metrics are often useful. They can gauge progress, serve as motivation, and settle competition. But they don’t show everything. Quantity of time rarely tells you much about the quality.

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